music
ambience: drum/chant
A Native American woman tells her grandson about when she was a girl – an old man took her to a special place where some of their people danced and sang. Well, now the grandson is grown up and he remembers the story. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“And this old guy took us to this place’, she says, ‘where all the Indians climbed something like a chalk or adobe staircase into this plateau.”
Patrick Orozco is a faith keeper of the Ohlone Rumsen people, out of Monterey, California.
“And there were all types of different types of artifacts’, she says and ‘women all lined up and started taking things out of their pouches. These whistles, some kind of whistles’, she says. ‘And the men started putting these skins all over their body. And they started painting their bodies up’. And she says ‘they started singing this song and dancing, and the women started blowing their whistles and hitting their clapper sticks’. And she says, ‘I think it was some kind of bird song.’ And that was very inspiring to me. And I sat there and says, Mom, describe to me exactly what the men were wearing.’ And she says, ‘a deer skin with all different kinds of feathers and abalone shell ornaments, and all kinds of deer antlers and deer hooves. And they painted their body’s black and white you know.’ And from that day I made my own regalia in according to what she saw. It was a great inspiration to me. My grandmother before she died, taught me all that she knew. The medicines, a little bit of the language, whatever she held onto. She told me, she says, ‘You must go out and learn more than what I have taught you. Because of other people that know more than I do. Learn and collect all that you do. And then go and teach the little ones, our own people, so they may learn. And then you go out and share it with the public. So they will know we are still here.'”
Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’m Jim Metzner.